Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

An invitation floated into my inbox last week from a former publishing colleague asking me and My Lovely Wife to join her for dinner. We typically gather once or twice a year to browse at a local bookfair before decamping to a nearby bistro to discuss our finds and reconnect, but this overture was of a more pressing nature.

She wanted to show her support for one of the many restaurants near the site of the Alex Pretti murder that have been struggling under the current federal occupation. And she wondered how we felt about inviting a few more people to “maximize our impact.”

I’m all for impact maximization during these troubling times, but the idea of sharing a meal with strangers (I don’t know who MLW and I would invite), is not a particularly appetizing one. I’m just not that sociable.

That’s not to say I’m completely unable to navigate with some social agility a roomful of people I hardly know. On a recent weekday evening, for instance, I spent 90 minutes standing in a neighbor’s kitchen exchanging light-hearted banter among a mix of familiar and unfamiliar faces. But these sorts of gatherings tend to leave me feeling a bit depleted, so I often need a good deal of convincing before I’ll wade into such a milieu and very little persuasion to escape before drowning.

This is not necessarily a healthy behavioral trait. Volumes of research over the years have described the harmful effects of isolating ourselves as we grow older. It’s been associated with a higher risk of heart disease, dementia, anxiety, and depression. And it’s become something of an epidemic among older adults: A recent University of Michigan survey found that about one in three respondents between the ages of 50 and 80 reported feeling lonely and isolated.

Pollsters found the issue to be particularly prevalent among those with poor mental or physical health and those who were unemployed (but not retired) or receiving disability income. It’s not clear from the survey’s results, though, whether it was the isolation that created the health issues or the health issues that created the isolation. In either case, none of this sufficiently explains my relative aversion to social gatherings. Recent research, however, may shed some light on the situation.

Researchers at the National Institute of Aging (NIA) last week published the results of a study that suggests the aging process affects certain regions of the brain that are key to social decision-making, dampening our interest in meeting and engaging with unfamiliar people. They observed the social behavior of 169 young and elderly lab rats and found that the older rodents “favored familiar peers over new ones.”

But after those older rats underwent a procedure that shifted the connectivity between those key brain regions, they were more likely to interact with unfamiliar rats. “[T]hese findings suggest that aging may influence social behavior through a distinct, potentially modifiable neural system that is at least partly separate from mechanisms underlying age-related spatial memory decline,” the authors note in a statement released by the Society for Neuroscience.

Humans are not rats, of course, but as William Haseltine, PhD, writes in a recent Psychology Today blog post, age-related changes in the brain may help explain our declining sociability as we grow older. While describing the various lifestyle factors that narrow our social circle over the years, Haseltine cites a 2025 German study that points to the shifting dominance of specific neural networks as a primary reason for our tendency to keep to ourselves.

Researchers analyzed data from the Leipzig study for mind-body-emotion interactions, which measured sociability levels based on responses to a questionnaire from 196 participants ranging in age from 20 to 77. Subsequent MRI brain scans revealed an association between lower sociability scores among older participants and an apparent shift in communications between specific brain regions.

As Haseltine explains it, the neural network involving memory, attention, and self-awareness that helps us thrive socially begins to erode as we grow older, making us much more prone to experience stress and anxiety in those situations. “As these connections fade, it may become harder to stay mentally sharp, engage in conversations, and feel confident in social settings,” he notes.

Meanwhile, another network becomes stronger as we age. “Aging enhances connections between somatosensory and motor regions of the brain, which process bodily sensations and movement,” he says. “This network often activates during moments of social stress, like when you are feeling excluded or judged. As this age-positive network strengthens, social interaction may start to feel more draining or overwhelming, possibly leading people to withdraw even if they want connection.”

That may explain my lack of sociability (I can’t speak for MLW), but it clearly doesn’t apply to our former publishing colleague, who is pushing 80 and seems perfectly at ease in any social scenario. And, as Haseltine argues, it just requires that we put forth a little more effort to connect. So, I guess we’ll thank our friend for the invitation and do our best to engage with whoever may join us.

Maybe we’ll even spend a few moments paying our respects at the Alex Pretti memorial, which should remind me just how insignificant my social discomfort really is.

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